Being overweight puts a
greater burden on women's health than men's, a
new study shows.
Dr. Peter Muennig of Columbia University in New
York and colleagues calculated the amount of illness
due to overweight and obesity in the USA. They
found that overweight cost US women 1.8 million
years of perfect health, compared to just 270,000
years lost for men. Obesity cost women 3.40 million
years of perfect health, compared to 1.94 million
years for men.
Muennig suggested in an interview that this gender
difference could be due to the social stigma that
excess weight carries for women but not for men.
While many studies have looked at the effect
of overweight and obesity on mortality, Muennig
and his team note, there is little information
on how excess weight might affect a person's well-being
while he or she is still alive. To investigate,
the researchers used a measurement called the
quality-adjusted life year (QALY), which represents
a year of being perfectly healthy, to determine
the burden of disease associated with obesity
in a nationally representative sample of adults.
Most of the years of health that women lost to
overweight and obesity were due to poor health-related
quality of life and later-life mortality, the
researchers note in the September issue of the
American Journal of Public Health.
Death rates among overweight and obese women
were lower than for men up until age 45; after
age 45, women's mortality was far higher than
men's.
Previous studies, which did not look at men and
women separately, have suggested that being overweight
may actually protect against mortality, Muennig
stated. "What we were shocked to find is that
men were really the primary beneficiaries of any
differences in the overweight category, and that
women actually had much higher morbidity and mortality,"
he added.
In their report, the researchers suggest several
explanations for the gender differences.
"To me what makes more sense is that there's
just a lot more social stigma associated with
being overweight amongst females, and that that
causes a lot more stress and distress," Muennig
said. "There's evidence showing that high levels
of stress can increase your risk of morbidity
and mortality."
The findings provide evidence, he added, that
"the message that women are getting in the mass
media about their weight is actually more harmful
than we previously thought."
SOURCE: American Journal of Public Health, September
2006.
